Oldest Alternate Histories

This page lists alternate histories written before the genre could be considered a genre.

Arguments can be made for a number of possible dates marking a possible genre beginning (see, e.g., Winthrop-Young's "Fallacies and Thresholds"), from the 1931 publication of J.C. Squire's anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise to the 1953 publication of Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee. The date chosen here is 1939, the year that L. Sprague de Camp's original short story of "Lest Darkness Fall" saw publication, an event which effectively made alternate history fiction a sub-genre of science fiction.

The increasing number of alternate histories which saw publication from the mid-1930s on are presumably a result of the generally respectful treatment given the subject by the essayists in Squire's If It Had Happened Otherwise and by historian Albert Toynbee in three essays included in his A Study of History.